How it Works

Understanding how jqGrid works will help you get up to speed with the full capabilities of the plugin.
The first thing to understand is that there are two aspects to working with tabular data:

Client-side representation, and

Server-side manipulation

JqGrid is a component that presents tabular data for easy manipulation in a web browser grid. jqGrid uses Ajax calls to retrieve information and construct the representation (tabular data) using the jqGrid Column Model (colModel).

Furthermore, jqGrid helps you send any data changes or additions to the database on the server-side, a process known as server-side manipulation, or SSM.

SSM means the server handles the actual changes to the database, and not the user's browser. SSM isn’t something that is visible within a web page. Server side data changes are done using PHP, or any other common programming language.

Body layer is the data requested from the server and displayed according to the settings in the column model.

Navigation layer contains additional information from the requested data and actions for requesting little pieces of information – in the literature called paging. Note that the navigation layer can be placed not only at bottom of the grid, but anywhere on the page. The Navigation layer is also the place for adding buttons or links for editing, deleting, adding to and searching your grid data.

The minimum for the representing the data are Header layer and Body layer.

To allow freedom and flexibility, and often a better impression, jqGrid relies on CSS (Cascading Style Sheets) to govern its appearance.